Day: February 18, 2025

February 18, 27 A.D.  –  The Rich Man and Lazarus #72

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , , , ,


Week 53 – The Rich Man and Lazarus
Luke 16:1-13

Last week, we discussed the parable of the unjust steward in Luke 16 and Jesus’ statement that “You can not serve God and mammon.”  Mammon is anything besides God that you put your trust in, especially wealth and possessions. Today, we will discuss the next parable in Luke 16, in which the primary character is an example of a man who has done just that—put all of his trust in money and not in God.

Luke 16:19   “There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.   And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores.   The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side.  The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.   And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.’   But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish.   And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’   And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house— for I have five brothers—so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’   But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’   And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’   He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”

There are two scenes in this parable:

There is life now and the life to come.  We must first recognize that the purpose of this parable is not to describe the life to come.  This is not a lecture on the afterlife. This parable is no more a description of what the life to come will look like than our previous parable is a lesson from Jesus for how to be a good land real estate management company.  Jesus is not giving business advice, and he is not giving a lecture on what heaven looks like.  So, we will not spend time discussing a description of the afterlife in this story.  If we were to spend what time we have with this parable debating if this is an accurate picture of the afterlife, then we would miss the entire point of the parable.   It is what you do in this life that matters. Concern yourself with how you live today.  It is what you do in this life that determines your placement in the afterlife.  So we see the two characters in life now and then in the life to come, and they are separated in both scenes.

And in the life to come, there is a “great chasm” between them that “none may cross.”  And the uncrossable canyon is the result of sin.  The only way to cross the chasm is by repenting, accepting Jesus as the King of your life, and living as the king would have you live.  As the wealthy man learned too late, repentance is only possible in this life.  You see, in this life, they were also separated by a wall.  But there was a gate.   There was an opportunity to cross from one side to the other.  But the rich man would not allow Lazarus to enter.   If he had repented of his worship of the idol of wealth and had shared, loving his neighbor as his self, he could have opened the gate to Lazarus.   This would be his repentance, a change in the direction of his life, a change in who directed his life, and thus a change in how he lived.  But the separation in the life to come has no gate.  The chance for repentance is past.  So,  we must not spend too much time focusing on how we will live after we die when our purpose on this earth is to live for Jesus now.  As the rich man learned, we can’t change how we live after we die.  But today, we can search God’s word and learn how he wants us to live.  Today, we can repent and live differently.  And we can then trust Yehovah, the God who loves us and has gone to prepare a place for us.   So, let’s look closely at this parable.

The rich man-  Notice that he is the character who does not have a name.  This is a reversal of what was expected.   Undoubtedly, in this life, everyone would have known the rich man’s name, but no one would know that the poor man had a name.  We are told that he is not just rich but also extremely wealthy, for he is clothed in purple and fine linen, the clothing of kings.  He feasted spectacularly every day.  Again, this identifies him as being in the place of kings.  But if you read carefully, you will find something about his character.  He is not righteous.  And we know this before we ever read about the poor man at his gate.  How?  He feasts every day.  This means he is not righteous.   God designed several feasts in the Biblical Calendar.  Feasts and celebrations are important to God.  We have discussed before the great Messianic Feast in the world to come.  God loves a good party.  God is all about celebrations.  But every day in this life is not a feast.  In God’s calendar, every day is not the same.  For the Jews in Jesus’ day, the seventh day, the Sabbath, is different.  It is special.  You do not do work on the Sabbath.  Nor do you ask any of your workers or slaves in your home to work.  But this man feasts every day.  So he is forcing his staff to work on the Sabbath.  By Biblical definition, we know he is not a righteous man.

We also learn he is a man who can’t see very well.  There is a poor man at his gate.  In this life, the rich man does not see Lazarus.  Oh, he may know that the poor man is at his gate.  “What an inconvenience!  How sad that all the guests coming to my sumptuous feast must pass by such a sight.  How disgusting that they have to pass by this horrible man covered in sores on their way to my beautiful party.”  The poor man’s dream is to have a few crumbs that fall from his table, but can you imagine what would happen if he gave this poor man food?  “Why, then,” the rich man would say, “he would never leave. And worse yet, even more poor, miserable people might be encouraged to come to get my scraps.  So I give the crumbs to the household dogs.  Perhaps the poor man will leave or just go ahead and die and stop ruining the curb appeal of my mansion.”

He doesn’t really see Lazarus in the parable until verse 23:

Luke 16:23  and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.

Now he sees him.  But still, the rich man does not see.  He may have noticed Lazarus in life, but he didn’t truly see him.  He didn’t see him as a human like him, created in the image of God as he was, in desperate need of love and care, starving while he feasted, suffering while he celebrated.  Now, he only sees Lazarus as just another servant who might increase his comfort, just like his servants in his prior life.

Luke 16:24  (my paraphrase)  Father Abraham, send Lazarus like a slave to comfort me, have him bring me some cold water.  Oh, Lazarus won’t mind walking through the flames to come serve me.  He won’t care; he is just a slave. 

And when told that it is impossible for Lazarus to go where he is, the rich man asks Abraham to send him back to warn his brothers to repent.  “Oh, Lazarus won’t mind leaving heaven to go back and do some service for me.”   Notice that he never directly addresses Lazarus.  In his mind, Lazarus is still someone beneath him.  Just another person to do his bidding.   He says, “Father Abraham…  Come on, Abraham, we are family.”  But He fails to see Lazarus as part of the family.  He is just a lowly servant, someone to bring him comfort.

Even in the flames of torment, he is unrepentant, for there can be no repentance after you die.

In 2 Timothy 2, Paul instructs Timothy on how to deal with opponents of the gospel.  

2 Timothy 2:25-26   Opponents must be gently instructed, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.

We pray that God will grant repentance. “Grant” means to bestow as a gift.  Jesus told us in John 16:8 that it is the Holy Spirit’s job to convict people of sin.  Repentance is a gift from God that, unfortunately, not all choose to accept.  On our own, none of us would ever repent.  And we see this rich man is now beyond repentance and beyond salvation.

And then there is Lazarus.

This is the only one of Jesus’ parables in which a character is named. He is Lazarus, the Greek form of the name Elazar, a common name in the Old Testament that means ‘God is my help.’  Jesus chose this name because this is a man who does not receive help from those around him; his only help comes from God.

 He is described as a “poor man.”  There are two Greek words for poor.  Penes and ptochos.  The penes are the working poor.  Those who are surviving day to day.  They are living in a shelter or a run-down shack.  They never have enough to eat, but they aren’t starving yet.  Their clothes are worn out, but they are not naked.  They have little hope that things will ever improve, but they are surviving.  This is the majority of the poor in Jesus’ day.  They lived in a foreign occupied country where work was scarce and taxes were oppressive.  These were hard times for the poor.  They were barely surviving.

But that is not who Jesus is talking about in this parable.  Jesus doesn’t use the word ‘penes’ but the other Greek word for the poor, the ‘ptochoi’ (singular ‘ptochos.’)  They are the completely destitute who own only the ragged clothes on their back and have no other possessions.  This Greek word comes from a root meaning “to cower in fear or cringe.”  They are not the working poor.  Due to physical problems, they can not work.  They can only beg.  They are not surviving.  They are dying in front of your eyes.  They have no hope.  Life will never get better.  For them, there is only suffering and then death.  

The New York Times published a picture in 1993 that I think best illustrates one who is ptochos, the hopeless poor.  It is a difficult picture to look at.  We instinctively do not want to look at the ptochoi.  But we must look.  This is a picture of a little boy in Sudan, Africa, who was one of many who was starving to death and attempting to walk to a UN feeding station.  Kevin Carter, a photojournalist, caught this picture of the child after he had collapsed on the way.  Just steps away is a hooded vulture, waiting on the child to die for its next meal.

This is the ptochoi.  This is the poor man at the gate in Jesus’ parable.  Starving, hopeless,  dying.  

Kevin Carter said he scared the vulture away before he left, but he did not know if the child ever made it to the feeding station.  [We later learned the child did make it and lived that day but died as a teenager of “fevers.”]  Kevin Carter committed suicide 4 months after he took this photo.  His suicide note said: “…I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners…”

This is a difficult picture to look at.  How are we supposed to respond when we lift up our eyes and see a child like this?  Are we supposed to be sad?  Should we mourn?

In the Old Testament book of Joel, the people had suffered a terrible tragedy.  A swarm of locusts devastated the land, destroying most crops.  Many would be hungry due to the resulting famine.  It was terrible.  And Joel said, because of your sin, Israel, even more devastation is coming.  An army will come to conquer you.  It will be an even more terrible time.  How should people react to such news?

People in those days usually reacted to terrible news by mourning and tearing their clothes, as Jacob did when he was told Joseph was dead, or as David tore his clothes when he heard of the deaths of Saul and Jonathan. But Joel tells them the proper response is not simply tearing their clothes and mourning.

Joel 2:12-13    “Yet even now,” declares Yehovah, “return to me with all your heart,
with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning, and rend your hearts and not your garments.
Return to Yehovah your God, for he is gracious and merciful
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and he relents over disaster.

Fasting, weeping, and mourning are all appropriate responses to disaster. But Joel says the outward show of mourning, which was common in their day, tearing their garments, was not the most important response.

Rend your hearts and not your garments.

Yes, be sad at the terrible plight of the poor, mourn that children are dying, and shed a tear when you see a child in such a state. But don’t just tear your clothes.  Tear your heart.  He says, “Return to me with all your heart.”  Return – the Hebrew shuv, which we translate as repent.  Your heart should change.  You should make a decision to repent when you see such a disaster.   Return to God for his patience, grace, and mercy are stronger than his justice.   (Notice that Joel is quoting the passage we looked at last week in Exodus 34, where God describes himself.)

The appropriate response to seeing this horrible picture of poverty and famine is not just mourning or crying.  Rend your hearts.  God expects us to react with broken hearts that lead to repentance.  Our hearts should be broken by the things that break God’s heart.  And broken hearts should lead us to return to his ways.  As he is a God of grace and mercy, he expects his children to act like their father and respond to disaster with grace and mercy.  Broken hearts that lead to actions of mercy through repentance.  But our rich man in this parable does not really see Lazarus.  His heart is hard.  He does not repent and give Lazarus mercy and grace.

They both died.  Death is the great leveler.  

Ecclesiastes 9:2  All share a common destiny—the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean,
Hebrews 9:27   People are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment,

Luke 16:22 The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side.  The rich man also died and was buried,

Is there any significance that the poor man dies first?  It was no surprise that this starving man covered in sores died soon.   A 2016 study by the National Institutes of Health showed that the extremely poor in the US died on average 15 years sooner than the average wealthy person.  The gap is even wider in third-world countries.   If a celebrity dies, it makes the news.  But the news is silent on the 20 homeless people who die in our country, on our doorstep, on average every day, most of them early, preventable deaths.  And notice this detail in the parable: Words are added to note that the rich man was buried.  Those words are missing when Lazarus dies.  The rich man likely had a magnificent funeral with a beautiful silk-lined coffin, the best vault, and a lovely granite marker.  There is no mention of even a burial of Lazarus.  He dies and is forgotten.  He was unnoticed in death as he was in life.  Not even a statistic.  

Now look at the rich man’s last request.  He asks Abraham to send Lazarus back to convince his five brothers to repent before it is too late.  Abraham tells him that all they need to know is written in the books of Moses and the Prophets.  But the rich man is convinced that if only Lazarus would return from the dead and warn them.  Then they would repent and not discover the truth too late as he did.  Abraham responds:  

Luke 16:31  “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.”

When Jesus is teaching this parable in 27 AD, it will be just a few days before he will be informed that his real-life friend Lazarus is ill.  Lazarus will die, and Jesus, 4 days later, will bring him back from the dead.  Just as the rich man in the parable asked, a man named Lazarus will come back from the dead.  And you think that would be enough to convince every person in Israel that Jesus was indeed who he said he was.  But Abraham in the parable was correct.  Even when the actual Lazarus returned from the dead, some refused to believe.  And just a few months later, when Jesus was crucified and after three days rose from the dead.  There were still those who refused to believe, refused to repent.  And there are people today who still refuse to believe, still those who refuse to repent.

This is a story of two people who lived extremely different lives in this world and then, in a great reversal, were placed in very different positions in the afterlife.  This is not about the “Haves” and the “Have Nots,” but rather the “Have more than they could possibly ever need” and The “Have Nothing, Need Everything”.   And the sad truth is that this happens every day in our time.  There are millions of the extremely poor, the ptochoi.  Some right at our doorstep.  Some are dying or starving while others feast sumptuously.    Like Lazarus in the parable, they are unseen.

When we began a program for the homeless in Alabama, many of those we first approached were resistant to starting services for the homeless in our county.  They said we don’t have any homeless people in Marshall County.  There is just no need.  But we had already identified hundreds of homeless people in our town and homeless children in our schools.  They were there, but no one wanted to see them. They could not see that they were already at their doorstep.  (There are entire webpages dedicated to educating tourists on how to avoid the homeless people in San Francisco, New York and other cities.)

After showing people in our county the data on our homeless population, they said if we were to begin to offer services to people without homes, it would just encourage more homeless to come to our town.  We will attract more homeless people and just have a bigger problem.  All they could see was the bigger potential problem for themselves.  They could not understand the need.  Like the rich man who refused to give crumbs from the table to Lazarus, they didn’t want to encourage the homeless to stay by giving them shelter or food or comfort.

We serve a God who sees.  When Abraham and Sarah horribly mistreat Hagar, their Egyptian slave, first sexually abusing her and then, after she was pregnant, treating her harshly, she flees to the wilderness.  In her despair, when she feels she has no hope, God comes to her and promises to care for her.  She calls God “El–Roi” the God who sees me.  God sees affliction, and he responds.  He sees the affliction of the children of Israel in Egypt.

Exodus 3:7   Then the LORD said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters.

I have a friend who suffered many years under an emotionally abusive husband.  She prayed for decades that he would come to repentance.   No one, other than her children and closest family, had any idea what she had endured.  But God saw her affliction and came to her and clearly told her that he saw her.  He was Yehovah El Roi to her.  This was the month before she was diagnosed with terminal cancer that was supposed to have ended her life several months ago.  She is still very much alive and has been delivered from the man who abused her.  When others could not see her in her distress, God saw her.  

Know that whatever you face in this life that God sees you.  He sees your affliction, he sees your sadness, he sees your family trouble, he sees your despair, he sees your grief, he sees you troubled by the same temptations.  The rich man did not see Lazarus in this life, but God saw the poor man.  And the God who sees is the God who heals, Yehovah El Roi is Yehovah rapha (Exodus 15:26.).  He is the God who provides Yehovah yireh (Genesis 22:14.)  And as the rich man in the story discovered and as many will discover one day, he is Yehovah Tzidkenu the God of righteousness, the God who judges. (Jeremiah 22:6, Jeremiah 33:16)

God sees us, and God cares for us.  This is certain.  The big question for us is, do we see as God sees?  Do we see the forgotten people on our doorstep?  Do we lift up our eyes now and see the needs around us? Do we really see them as created in the image of God, as members of the family, as brothers?  Do we see ourselves as we are, and do we repent while there is still time to repent?

In Luke 7, Jesus is dining at the home of a Pharisee named Simon.  The dinner is interrupted by a woman, a known sinner, who comes in and breaks an alabaster flask of ointment and anoints Jesus, and washes his feet.  Jesus takes that opportunity to tell the parable of the debtors.  One owed 50 and the other 500.  Neither could afford to pay, so both debts were written off.  Jesus asked Simon, “Which will love him more?”  

Luke 7:43-44   Simon answered, “The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.” And he said to him, “You have judged rightly.” Then turning toward the woman he [Jesus] said to Simon, “Do you see this woman?

Well, of course, he saw her, Jesus.  She caused a big commotion, upsetting his dinner party.  But he did not see the same woman Jesus saw.  He saw a sinner.  Someone less righteous than him.  Someone who would never be invited to his home.  Someone who was unclean.  

Jesus recognized that she was a sinner; he later tells Simon, “her sins, which are many…”  But who Jesus saw was not simply a sinner, but a repentant sinner who acted out her repentance.   And he tells her she is forgiven.  She is a sinner who has repented, acted out her repentance, been forgiven, saved by her faith, and will depart in peace. “Do you see this woman?”

Matt. 7:3 Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?

Klyne Snodgrass, in his excellent book, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus, says it well:  

“The ability to see is the mark of Christian discipleship.”1

This parable of Jesus is, in some ways, the story of the blind man who was never healed.

If only we can look at others and ourselves with our Father’s eyes.  If only we could see our own sins instead of focusing on the sins of others.  If only we could see the needs at our doorstep,  If only we can see how loving, how forgiving, how patient, and how merciful our Father is to his children.  Then perhaps we would be swift to repent, swift to forgive, swift to share, and swift to worship.  Like the man in John 9, there are lots of things I do not know or understand, but this I know.  Once I was blind, now I can see, and Jesus made all the difference.

Let us not spend our time in this world talking about heaven and the life to come.  It will come, and your destination in the world to come will be determined by your repentance or your lack of repentance today, by how you treat others, and by how you treat the poor.  Everyone reading these words is in the same situation.  We are all sinners, every one of us.  We may have different sins, but we all fall short of the glory of God.  I fall short daily.  As long as we breathe, we have another God-given opportunity to repent of whatever stands between us and God and to live today more closely following our Savior.  This is the day Yehovah has made.  Let us repent and be glad in it. 

1.  Snodgrass, Klyne R.. Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (p. 434). Kindle Edition. 

February 14, 27 A.D. —   The Unjust Steward #71

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , ,

Week 52 — The Unjust Steward
Luke 16:1-13

We are in week 52/70 of the appointed year of the Lord. We are walking week by week through Jesus’ ministry. Today, we will cover what many say is the most challenging parable Jesus told. It is found in Luke 16.

Luke 16:1-8   He also said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his possessions.   And he called him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Turn in the account of your management, for you can no longer be manager.’   And the manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do, since my master is taking the management away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.   I have decided what to do, so that when I am removed from management, people may receive me into their houses.’   So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’   He said, ‘A hundred measures of oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty.’   Then he said to another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He said, ‘A hundred measures of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and write eighty.’   The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. 

Let me see if I have this straight.  A landowner finds out that the person managing his land was cheating him.  So he fires the manager and tells him to turn in his books.  But before word gets out about his being fired, he calls in the renters one at a time and quickly changes the books so they will owe much less, hoping to gain friends and influence by being generous with his ex-boss’s money and cheating his boss even more.  Surprisingly, his former boss commends him for his ‘shrewdness.’  This is a tough one.

First, does it bother you that Jesus used a dishonest manager to make a point? It didn’t bother Jesus, for he tells several stories that use characters who act unrighteously to teach lessons in righteousness.  Jesus tells stories that include righteous and unrighteous people, for the world these disciples live in has both.  

For example, there is the short parable of the man who accidentally discovers that his neighbor’s field has buried treasure in it.   He doesn’t tell his neighbor but deceives his neighbor into selling him the field.  Is that good business practice?   It certainly isn’t righteous, but Jesus uses this real-life example to say that the kingdom of heaven is like that treasure you give up everything to obtain.  He says nothing about the man’s behavior; the parable is about the treasure, the kingdom.

Then there is the unneighborly neighbor in Luke 11 who doesn’t want to be bothered by his neighbor who needs food at night.  This man is not loving his neighbor as himself.  This is followed by Jesus asking What kind of father would give his child a scorpion if he asked for food?   This is a “how much more” parable, as seen in the explanation:

Luke 11:13  If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”  

Jesus says if an unrighteous neighbor will eventually help, how much more will righteous God help you?  Finally, there is the unrighteous judge in Luke 18:

Luke 18:1-5  He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’  For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’”

Again, this is a ‘how much more’ parable.  If even this unrighteous judge will eventually give in and give justice, how much more will a righteous God give justice to his people who cry out to him?  So don’t get hung up on the idea that Jesus uses unsavory characters in his parables.  Let’s see what Jesus is teaching using this story.

In Jesus’ day, the way to gain wealth was to play the game.  That is just the way the economy was set up. There were some honest jobs, such as fishing and being a craftsman.  But the way to get ahead financially was land ownership.  Since much of Israel in this day was occupied by the Romans, many wealthy Romans bought up land in Israel and then hired managers to collect their profits while they lived back in Rome.  This is much like many vacation towns in the US now, where wealthy people buy up many of the hotels and Airbnb’s and then hire locals to manage their property.  So, it is a story we can all identify with.  But this manager was doing a poor job, so he was fired.  The manager then acts dishonestly, cheating the owner even more by adjusting the books to gain favor with the renters.  

Then, something completely unexpected happens in the story.

Luke 16:8   The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness.

You would expect the landowner to be angry and perhaps have the manager arrested.   The story has jumped the rails.  That is not a reasonable way for the rich land-owner to act.  The story no longer makes sense in our world.  This wealthy landowner is nothing like a typical landowner, as they know.  This parable has to be an allegory to make sense.  Jesus never explains the allegory (as he did with the parable of the four soils), but he does clarify the lesson from the parable:

And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.

Here is where we know without a doubt that the story is an allegorical parable.  Who could possibly reward you with “eternal dwellings?”  This only works if the wealthy landowner is God, for he is the only one in charge of ‘eternal dwellings.’  He owns all of the riches and all of the land.  The manager is one of God’s people who was placed in charge of managing some of God’s resources.  (Recall that Adam in Genesis was placed in the garden in Eden to manage it.)   But this manager was doing a poor job of managing God’s resources.  Such a poor job that God decided to fire him and take away his resources.  But then the manager completely changes his way of dealing with people and acts in such a way that makes God commend him.  He takes God’s resources and deals them out with extravagant grace and mercy.  And God is pleased with him.  By treating all the people living on God’s land with grace and mercy and freely dispersing God’s resources, the manager has made a friend using wealth as a tool and is received into the eternal dwelling.

Jesus goes on:

Luke 16:10   “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much.  If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?   And if you have not been faithful in that which is another’s, who will give you that which is your own?   

We put a lot of emphasis on ownership.  I paid off my truck last month and got the title in the mail this week.  It says that I own that truck.  But the Biblical view is that God owns this world, and we are his stewards, managing portions of God’s property.  That rancher in Yellowstone may think he owns the cattle on a thousand hills, but the Bible says differently.

Deuteronomy 10:14    To Yehovah your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it.
Psalm 24:1    The earth is Yehovah’s and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it;

Jesus ends his teaching on this parable with this verse:

No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”

Something interesting happens in the Greek in this verse.  The final word, ‘money,’ is not translated into Greek but left as a Semitic word, ‘mammon.’  So this is a Hebrew or Aramaic word spelled with Greek letters.  When the Bible was translated from Greek to Latin in the 4th century, it was again not translated but left as a Semitic word.  When the King James Bible was translated in 1611, it also kept the Hebrew word, Mammon in the verse.

Luke 16:13   “…Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

Jesus has personified “mammon” in his statement, which led many in the Middle Ages to falsely believe there was a demon of greed and money named ‘Mammon,’ as seen in John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  But this was not what Jesus meant.

So what is the meaning of this Hebrew word, “mammon?”   It developed as a Hebrew word about 200 years after the last book of the Old Testament was written, so you won’t find it in the Old Testament.  It is, however, frequently seen in Hebrew documents in the Dead Sea Scrolls, so we know it was a commonly used word in Jesus’s day.  It was derived from a root word frequently used in the Old Testament.  It is a Hebrew word that you know: ‘Amen.’  It is another word the Bible doesn’t translate but leaves as a Hebrew word (like Hallelujah, Hosannah, Jubilee).   When we end a prayer, we say this Hebrew word, amen.  It is spelled in Hebrew with the letters, aleph, mem, nun (A, M, N).  We must understand the root word ‘amen’ to understand what mammon means.

This root carries the ideas of stability, reliability, and truth; various forms of the word are found throughout the Scriptures.  

A form of this word is found in one of the most important verses in the Old Testament.  It is in the two verses in the Old Testament that the writers of the books of the Old Testament quote more often than any other verses, Exodus 34:6,7.

These verses are the John 3:16 of the Old Testament. They are the most important verses of the Old Testament.  Let me give you the context.  In this section of Exodus, the children of Israel have left Egypt, passed through the parted waters of the sea, and camped at the base of Mount Sinai.  Moses has been up on the mountain, brought down the 10 commandments on stone tablets, and found his people worshipping a golden calf.  Moses returned to the mountain to intercede for the people and remake the stone tablets.  And Moses asks to see God’s glory.  God says, You can’t see my face, but I will show you part of my glory.  So God places Moses in a cleft in the rock, and God passes before him.  And when God is revealing himself to Moses, this is how God describes himself:

Exodus 34:6-7  Yehovah passed before him and proclaimed, “Yehovah, Yehovah, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty…”

If you want to understand who God is, then study how God describes himself.  In a job interview, you are often asked to give several adjectives to describe yourself.  God does just that with Moses on the mountain.  It is no wonder this is the most quoted verse by the writers of the Old Testament.  See the balance of love, mercy, grace, truth, and justice in God’s self-description.  We could spend weeks and weeks on understanding these verses.  The Bible Project has a 14-week series on this; you should check it out.  That is where I learned much of what you hear now. But we are just looking at the word ‘amen’ and its variants to understand this word, mammon.  

God is abounding in steadfast (covenantal) love and faithfulness.  What we translate as ‘faithfulness’ is ‘emet,’ a form of our word, amen.  Tim Mackie from The Bible Project said ‘amen’ has to do with stableness and reliability.  When Moses had to hold up his hands for hours for the Israelites to defeat the Amalekites, they put a rock under his arms so they would be stable or steady.  When emet is used for people, it describes reliable and stable character or trustworthiness. For example, when Moses appointed leaders in Israel, they were to be “people of emet,” trustworthy people who wouldn’t take bribes or distort justice.  God is stable and reliable, and his character is unchanging. he is dependable and worthy of trust because he is faithful. This is why Moses describes God as a rock.  

Jesus often said, “Verily, Verily, I say to you….

John 3:3 Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Or in the ESV:

John 3:3 Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Verily is an English word from the Latin ‘Veritas,’ which means ‘truth.’  But again, in the Greek New Testament, this is our untranslated Hebrew word ‘amen.’  So Jesus literally says,

 “Amen, amen, I say to you….” Jesus says, “This is the truth; you can count on this.   I stand as a witness that this is true.”  Jesus says this over 100 times in the gospels.  

In the Old Testament, prayers, blessings, and curses were often concluded with “amen.” Paul does the same in his letters, concluding his prayers or blessings with “amen.” 

1 Chronicles 16:36 Blessed be Yehovah, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting!”  Then all the people said, “Amen!” and praised Yehovah.
Romans 15:33 May the God of peace be with you all. Amen.
Philippians 4:20 To our God and Father be glory forever and ever. Amen.

 By saying ‘amen,’ you say, “This is true, and I stand witness to it.”  

When Jesus is talking with Pilate before he is sentenced to die, Jesus tells Pilate his purpose in coming:

John 18:37-38 Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth.

Jesus came to be God’s witness to the truth.

Rev. 3:14   “And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: ‘The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation.

Jesus is God’s  ‘Amen’ – his life is a witness to who God is and what God has said all along.

2 Corinthians 3:20  For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.  

Jesus is the amen.  He is the fulfillment of the promise of God given thousands of years before. He is the witness that all God said is true.

Amen is spelled a m n. (Hebrew is written right to left, typically with no vowels אמן ).  Mammon is the noun form of the verb amen.    In Hebrew, you often make a noun out of a verb or other word by adding the letter ‘mem’ (our ‘m’) to the front of it.  So we take the verb ‘amen’ and add a preceding mem and get mammon (מאמן).  Amen, the verb, means to affirm or testify as true or trustworthy.  So the noun form (mammon) is“the thing in which you put your trust.”  It came to be a word for wealth or riches because many people who have riches have put their trust in their riches instead of God.

In our scripture today, Jesus says you can’t serve both God and mammon.  It has to be one or the other.  You can’t put your trust in God and also put your trust in wealth.  Where do you place your trust?  

I have a friend who is a ‘prepper.’  He has an entire room of his house filled with food and supplies and equipment he feels he will need one day when the world system collapses.  He has spent thousands of hours researching and a small fortune and feels sure he will be ready to survive almost any catastrophe. Now, don’t get me wrong.  I was a Boy Scout, and the scouts’ motto was “Be prepared.”  There is nothing wrong with being prepared. But this friend has gone way overboard.   He has placed his hope in the future in the contents of that room.  Where do you place your trust?  Let’s see what the First Testament says:  

Proverbs 11:28   Whoever trusts in his riches will fall, but the righteous will flourish like a green leaf.
Proverbs 18:11   The wealth of the rich is their fortified city; they imagine it a wall too high to scale.

And one from the Psalms:

Psalm 20:7    Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Yehovah, our God.

The Bible tells the king of Israel never to build an enormous army or purchase horses and chariots from Egypt.  They should not trust their army for protection but trust God to be their defender.   If they build a vast army, they say they don’t trust God to protect them.  This is why David got in so much trouble for taking a census in 2 Samuel.  Remember, an enemy was threatening them, and David decided to take a census to see how many soldiers they had to fight.   The reason the Bible shows this as a terrible sin is that David showed his lack of trust in God by putting his trust in the number of his soldiers.

Mammon is something that you put your trust in instead of God.

Look at a coin or the back of some US currency.   You will find the phrase “In God We Trust.” Since 1864, this has been on coins and paper currency since 1957.  This motto was adapted from a line in Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner”  (though you probably only know the first verse).   Here is the fourth verse:

O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with vict’ry and peace may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the power that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto – “In God is our trust,”
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

“In God we trust” became the official motto of the US in 1956.

Knowing this, you may find it ironic that Jesus said, “You can’t put your trust in both God and money,” and then we go and place “In God we trust” directly on that other thing we can’t put our trust in.  Theodore Roosevelt thought it was more than a little ironic to put “In God we trust” on mammon, the very thing Jesus singled out as something you can not place trust in.  Roosevelt, in fact, said to put the phrase on money would be “dangerously close to sacrilege” and ordered it removed from new coinage in 1907.1  But the people of the US wanted it there, and there was such a public outcry that Congress passed an act in 1908 reinstating the motto on coinage.

I don’t have a problem with the motto being on our money. I only wish the people in charge of the money really meant it.   Perhaps we can use that to our advantage.  Every time you start to spend money on something, look at the motto and ask yourself, “Am I putting my trust in God or in mammon (money or wealth)?  (Maybe I need to have it printed on my bank card.)

When talking with a friend a few years ago about my upcoming retirement, he asked me if I felt I had enough money set aside to “feel secure.”  The answer was no.  I did not, and I do not have enough money set aside to feel secure.  And I never will.  What I have learned from the Word of God is that there is no security in money.  I have read the parable of the man who had so many possessions that he had to rent bigger storage units, excuse me, build bigger barns.  I read what God said to that man,

Luke 12:20-21 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’  So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

I heard Jesus say the birds of the air don’t store food in barns. They aren’t preppers, but God feeds them. I remember Jesus saying we should store up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves don’t break in and steal. There is no security in money or things.

But we are tempted to put our trust in money.  How do we combat that temptation?  One day, Jesus told a young man how to deal with this.  He came to Jesus saying he had kept the commandments, but what more did he lack?  What did he need to inherit eternal life?  And Jesus saw that he was a man of great possessions and prescribed the cure for putting his faith in his wealth.  Jesus told him to give it away.  Jesus told him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”

The cure for the temptation to put trust in money and possessions instead of God:  generosity.

Jesus didn’t ask anyone else in the Bible to give it all away.  He didn’t ask that of another man who came to him with the same problem, Zacchaeus.  Zacchaeus was a man who had put all of his trust in money and put aside following God. As a tax collector, he cheated his way into as much money as possible.  Until he met Jesus.  When he meets Jesus, he decides to put his trust in God and starts giving that money away.

Jesus’ message to the rich young ruler was the same as the message he gives in our parable today:

And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.

We don’t own anything.  We are given stewardship of God’s resources.  God will commend us if we resist the temptation to keep those resources to ourselves and, like the manager in the parable, be extravagantly generous in passing along the master’s resources to those around us in need.  

This parable of the unjust steward is challenging. We worked through a Hebrew grammar lesson and an American History lesson to understand it. However, applying Jesus’ words to our lives requires more work. As discussed last week, Jesus said, “Many people will hear what I am saying, but only a few will do these words.”

Randy Alcorn said it this way:

“When I grasp that I’m a steward, not an owner, it totally changes my perspective. Suddenly, I’m not asking, “How much of my money shall I, out of the goodness of my heart, give to God?” Rather, I’m asking, “Since all of ‘my’ money is really yours, Lord, how would you like me to invest your money today?”
As long as I hold tightly to something, I believe I own it. But when I give it away, I relinquish control, power, and prestige. When I realize that God has a claim not merely on the few dollars I might choose to throw in an offering plate, not simply on 10 percent or even 50 percent, but on 100 percent of “my” money, it’s revolutionary. If I’m God’s money manager, I’m not God. Money isn’t God. God is God. So God, money, and I are each put in our rightful place.”

  1. President Theodore Roosevelt, 13 November 1907  from The New York Times 11/14/1907.
  2. Randy Alcorn, in an interview with Joshua Becker, posted on Alcorn’s website (https://www.epm.org/resources/2017/Jul/5/christ-centered-stewardship/)